Use the Lack of Information to Generate Better Shorelines

Lidar is inherently or, maybe I should say theoretically, a great way to generate shorelines at specific tide levels. The National Ocean Service (NOS) has done a lot of work on this and have the specifications down to produce the best shoreline possible; however, there are hundreds to thousands (??) of coastal lidar data sets that were not collected to the NOS standards and would provide great historical shorelines for coastal studies. I am presently working on a project looking at just this – high accuracy historical shorelines and want to include lidar-derived ones as well as imagery derived ones. I struggled with the consistency of the initial results, but knew the information was there.

OK, yeah I know, we have all made DEMs using the as-is lidar and generated shorelines; it is pretty easy in many cases – depending on the lidar collection conditions (a reoccurring theme for me) and how it was manually (yeah this still occurs) processed. In some cases and/or parts of the study area it can be really off the mark. The problem is that the area being studied does not necessarily have continuous data coverage. So, please read on if shorelines and lidar interest you.